Critical Resistance’s The Abolitionist newspaper has been a much-valued organizing resource for prison industrial complex (PIC) abolition to thousands of imprisoned people for the past two decades. This radical political education and cross-wall organizing project would not be possible without the support of countless volunteers around the world who provide content, translation, and copyediting.
Currently, The Abolitionist Newspaper & Editorial Collective of Critical Resistance (CR) has three pools of volunteers who assist with translation, copy editing, and transcription. Each volunteer pool uses a list-serve to coordinate support tasks for volunteers to take on translation, transcription or copy editing of articles, interviews and other content that the editorial collective generates for each issue of the newspaper. The editorial collective now primarily uses the copy editing and transcription volunteer pools, while translation is now contracted with an editorial collective member for each issue.
If you’re interested in volunteering as a Copy Editor or Transcriber for CR & The Abolitionist, check out what this entails below and contact The Abolitionist Project Coordinator, Molly Porzig: molly@criticalresistance.org
Copy Editing for The Abolitionist
Each issue of CR’s newspaper goes through several rounds of editing: first two rounds of content editing and then two rounds of copy editing. Volunteer Copy Editors are onboarded by the Project Coordinator to apply CR’s Copy Editing Style Guide to each piece that the Project Coordinator then assigns to different volunteer Copy Editors outside the editorial collective. This helps save capacity and labor within the editorial collective, helping our editors in the collective focus more on the content of each piece and working tightly with contributing authors.
Contact the Project Coordinator if you’re an experienced Copy Editor to express your interest
The Project Coordinator will then share CR’s Copy Editing Style Guide and a Copy Editing Quiz with you to complete in order to demonstrate your copy editing skills and ability to apply the style guide consistently.
Once you submit your quiz, the Project Coordinator will set up a 30-minute zoom meeting with you to debrief your work and set you up to receive copy editing tasks through the list-serve.
Once onboarded into the copy editing volunteer pool, and once the editorial collective approaches time for an issue to go through all copy editing, the Project Coordinator posts the issue job announcing deadlines for two rounds of Copy Editing and asking who is available for this issue. If you are available, you then sign up for a round by responding on the list-serv.
Copy Editing typically happens in October & April of each year.
All copy editors also receive a Thank-You copy of the issue once it prints in December or June.
Transcribing for CR & The Abolitionist
Since people who are locked up in jails, detention centers, and prisons often don’t have access to the digital and audio media that people outside of cages do, and instead rely much more heavily on print media for movement news and analysis, transcriptions are an essential part of CR’s work with imprisoned people,
If an issue of The Abolitionist newspaper involves interviews, or the editorial collective consents to printing an excerpt of an event, CR’s editorial collective needs to transcribe audio recordings into text. Because CR also corresponds with thousands of imprisoned people, receiving letters and written submissions from imprisoned writers or amplifying prisoner resistance outside cages through CR’s Prisoner Speak Out, CR & The Abolitionist often use transcription to publish prisoner writing.
CR’s Transcription pool runs similarly to the Copy Editing pool – when the editorial collective (or another work area of CR) has a need for transcription support of audio recordings or prisoner writing, a CR member posts to the transcriber list-serv.
Transcription Guidelines (for both audio recordings & prisoner hand-written submissions and letters) are shared with all transcribers
Material to be transcribed is then shared with the transcribers who volunteer in response to the post
Transcriptions for event support or prisoner writing can happen at any point in a year, while transcription for The Abolitionist Newspaper specifically happens when the editorial collective is still generating content and approaching editing, which typically is in September and March.
While CR works with volunteers with a range of background experience in copy editing and transcription, CR needs volunteers to be able to deliver tight follow through, clear communication and accountable turn-around in order to work with us. If interested in volunteering, please make sure you can do the work accountably.
